Colm Tóibín reads a story by Eugene McCabe, "one of Ireland's most accomplished short story writers" though not yet widely known beyond the Republic. Set in the borderlands between Monaghan and Fermanagh, "Music at Annahullian" recounts what happens when a woman, trapped in a claustrophobic old house with her brothers – decides she would like to buy a secondhand piano on sale locally, which comes to stand for "all her hope and for all our hopes".

In Téa Obreht's story a 10-year-old boy, Bojan, finds a dangerous solution to coping with the ferocious dog his soldier father has brought back from the front

Photograph: Illustration: Juan Moore

The year Bojan turned 10, his father was assigned a sentry mastiff called Kaiser, and when his father came back from the front that summer, he brought the dog to live with them.

Bojan had never had a dog. He had spent the duration of his father's military service living with the housekeeper on the northern outskirts of the city, on a shady linden-lined avenue in a house that had belonged to his family for three generations. The housekeeper, Mrs Senka, was a tired woman with dry yellow hair resembling frayed rope, and she kept mostly to herself, except on Sundays, when she prepared a feast for the women of her congregation. Something about Bojan's excitement concerning the dog's arrival had struck a chord with her, and she had taken him to study the breed catalogue at the library, and to the butcher, so that Bojan himself could pick out the bones he would give the dog.